Prologue

— We beseech you, save this world. — O Goddess.

 

*

 

A few days after those words had been spoken to her, Ilya sat rummaging idly through the toolbox in her own room, her mind turning over one thing after another.

 

*

 

Applied to the framework of Earth's knowledge, this world, Rattle Wesvania, was deism itself. Even if "itself" wasn't quite the most accurate way to put it, the world ran on laws fashioned by a creator-god (not by any of the beings in this world who actually went by the name of "god"), and at present that creator wasn't intervening in it at all, so calling it deism wasn't wrong either.

As a premise, this world was not a planet like Earth. It was spherical, what one would call the shape of a star, yet there was no sun, no satellite, not even the distant stars that should have glittered in the night sky.

People, monsters, nature: all of them were indirectly regulated by the management tower called the world tree, and the world circulated without the slightest waste.

A god's miniature garden.

That, from Ilya's vantage point, was what this world was.

Because everything lay within the laws, every event that had ever occurred in this world carried meaning. Take, for example, the very recent disturbance that had originated in the Empire. From a micro perspective it was an issue between common-human supremacy and the imperial line, but on the macro scale, the matter laid bare a connection within the laws: that the three-way deadlock of divine elements, dragon elements, and demon elements… the mutual countering… lay behind it as a distant cause.

A three-way deadlock.

That is to say: the god overcomes the dragon, the dragon overcomes the oni, and the oni overcomes the god.

Even a dragon possessing colossal stores of mana could not prevail against the divine workings of a god, which interfered with phenomena themselves. No matter how stalwart an oni's flesh might be, it could not break through the intangible wall of mana that was a dragon. And before an oni, who had slipped free of the wedge of phenomena, even the iron hammer of a god was meaningless.

This mutual countering had played out not only in the Empire but all across the world, a so-called "law of nature."

A person born suddenly with dragon elements would, thanks to their colossal mana, rise to prominence. And through the [Exhilaration] effect contained in those elements, they would stir up the people around them; but that power, which they could not control on their own, would eventually run wild and escalate into upheaval.

What appeared at the climax of such an upheaval was a hero… one who bore divine elements. Wielding weapons that only the chosen could handle, they would brandish godlike power and strike down the source of the upheaval.

If things ended there, it would be a happy ending out of a fairy tale; but reality was rarely so accommodating.

They would be betrayed by those who came to fear that power. Through the immortality granted as a boon of the divine elements, every person close to them would die, and they would grow sick at heart. Those around them would find them eerie, and persecute them.

In such ways, those who had once been heroes would come to despise people, to hate them, and in the worst cases, to bare their fangs.

Or, in a different vein, by standing above others, they could grow conceited, look down on them, and become arrogant in their wish to make others obey.

A hero gone mad would end up killed by the people. If they were struck down in due course, well and good; but if any such hero failed to die and lingered on, they would only twist the world further.

When the world they had come to loathe, the world they had come to look down on, told them "we have no need of you," it was hardly unreasonable that they should fly all the more into a rage.

And what was born in that twisted world was a bug of mutation… an owner of demon elements.

As an assassin, as a member of a rebellion, in whatever form, they would slay the owner of divine elements. As one piece of the mutual countering, one piece of the laws.

And in time, the owner of the demon elements would draw their last breath as well. Most of them were born into ages of chaos. The [Madness] effect their elements carried would derange the bearer themselves; the laws would not permit the owner of demon elements who had ended an age of chaos to remain as a new hero.

The hero who had not gone mad, and the hero who had: both would, in the end, be killed by people who had gone mad. Whether by mere greed-driven people or by people bearing demon elements, the kind might differ, but the outcome itself did not change.

Sooner or later, with the hero's death, a brief peace would come… Until the next upheaval rose.

That said, this was only the worst flow as seen by those who lived through such an era; it wasn't a fixed track. What could be said of all element-owners was that they were not necessarily eliminated in accordance with the mutual countering.

Naturally there were also cases where they perished unnoticed, through accident or other factors, without dragging anyone else into it.

The cases of being killed in accordance with the mutual countering she had laid out above were examples of what happened when something like the coercive force, or perhaps the corrective force, of fate intervened. Laws a god had decided would make things turn out that way.

Past cases where, by those laws, whether they wished it or not, those persons came to kill and be killed.

Looking back over all of that, Torsti, bearer of demon elements, amounted to a person born as a counter against the conceit of the Empire (divine elements) that was bound to come, sooner or later.

The Empire incident must have been a flow meant to halt the divine elements' conceit by sheer force.

To Ilya, who saw it that way, Torsti looked like a victim of fate, made to carry demon elements by the corrective force.

The dragon god and the demon god and the Emperor. If she thought of these as the three-way deadlock left in the modern age, then realizing Torsti's wish, "a nation that does not rely on the divine swords," might well be difficult. However…

(Just because it's difficult doesn't mean we should give up; the moment we do, the very possibility of changing things, of being able to change them, drops to zero.)

Set aside what had been; think instead about what was to come.

Switching mental gears, Ilya thought it through.

The Apostle, by all appearances, wished to set her up as the world's coordinator… to enshrine her as a god.

The great spirits were connected to the world tree at their roots, so the Goddess and Miko titles she had so thoroughly disowned must, all that time, have been spoken in earnest.

For the one in question, it was nothing but a nuisance.

As the Apostle had said, even if any number of evil gods came, she had the ability (the cheats) to win. Going further, by defeating the evil gods and monsters without anyone catching on, she could even sidestep the Apostle's intentions.

But she had no intention of doing so, none whatsoever.

The Apostle's aim was, presumably, to have her display her defeat of the evil gods, or else announce it publicly, in order to make the people aware of her abilities and drag her out onto the world stage.

Many people, faced with a problem that their own strength couldn't do anything about, gave up on effort and tried to rely on the strength of someone else. He was counting on that.

If Ilya's abilities became known, and if the "calamity that is to come," as the Apostle put it, was something completely beyond human hands, then people might well start turning to her, the bearer of cheat-grade ability, to rely upon.

Going further still, the moment her victories were known, it wouldn't be out of the question that some would even take to worshiping and revering her.

Mere lip service or not, this was a world where the dragon god, revered in any number of places, and other beings with superhuman power, gods, actually existed; precisely because of that, it could happen.

(… Though how I get treated is the least of my concerns, really.)

Setting her own treatment aside, the Apostle would seize the situation and, as outlined above, agitate everyone around her. All for the very purpose of "making the world one."

It wasn't hard to imagine that the reason he had this time chosen the form of an appeal made directly to Ilya was that he considered it the most effective means against her.

Appeal to her sense of compassion, sever her retreat so that she couldn't pretend not to see, and only then state his demands, creating the illusion that resolving the problem was synonymous with consenting to him.

(He's basically a swindler, isn't he? Ugh, no thanks.)

Ilya was on the verge of letting out a sigh, but she had no intention of going along with any of it.

The Apostle's plan looked carefully laid at first glance, yet it contained one element it could not do without. That was the premise that this monster outbreak and the resurrection of the evil gods are a situation beyond human hands.

Only when this premise held did the conclusion, Ilya becomes a god and saves the people, come into being.

In other words, if the people here rose up and resolved the situation themselves, then that very premise would collapse, and the necessity of Ilya becoming a god would vanish along with it.

(Which is the conclusion!)

And the Apostle who had made this proposal, if he let this chance slip by, would no longer be able to draw Ilya in.

If she could ride out this round, the Apostle would in all likelihood stop involving himself.

(… Probably. Or rather, please stop!)

A fair portion of that was her own wish (I don't want to think he has any more cards up his sleeve than what he's already played), but no matter how she turned it over, the conclusion ended up the same as when the Apostle had first been born.

She would not lift a hand. That was the whole of it.

That said —

(… I will run my mouth, though!)

In the hand of the girl who had reached that conclusion in her breast, a piece of keseki was held, kindled with a pale green light.